Re: Space after Periods
kchang@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Kenneth Chang)
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 93 19:22:05 -0500
Message-id: <9307020022.AA17530@newton.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
From: kchang@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Kenneth Chang)
X-Sender: kchang@newton.ncsa.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: Space after Periods
Status: RO
Odd # of >s = Terry Allen
Even # of >s = Daniel Miles Kehoe
>> > Rendered text usually has more space after a period that closes
>> > a sentence than after a period that marks an abbreviation,
>>
>> Wait a second.... is the model a typewritten page or a published
>> page? Typists follow the rule of adding an extra space between
>> sentences within a paragraph. The rule for books (and by extension,
>> anything that does not use a fixed-pitch, monospaced font) is to use
>> the same space between sentences as between words. (I checked the
>> standard references, both "Words into Type" and the "Chicago Manual
>> of Style," on this.)
>
>You should look at real books instead.
To be more precise:
* Typewritten documents should have two spaces after sentence-ending periods.
* Word processed documents should use a single space.
* TeX and other typesetting programs often use a "long" space at the end of
sentences. It's more than a single space character, but much less than two.
Actually, I think most books don't do this any more. Newspapers certainly
don't. It's way too much trouble escaping out all the abbreviations. It
doesn't really add anything to readability.
I personally would prefer "one space fits all" as writers of HTML really
shouldn't need to know the fineries of typography (What's next? Range
kerning?), especially since it's not something 99.99% of people will notice
(i.e. it won't even look "wrong").
Then again, I didn't even notice until Terry mentioned so it's not a major
problem either way.
--ken chang
NCSA Publications